Allow me to get one thing clear before I really jump into this article: I love Christopher Morel. I firmly believe that having professional baseball players act in a manner that clearly shows that they are having fun is important for the growth of the game. Frankly, I wish I derived even 20 percent of the enjoyment from my daily activities than he does from playing baseball. Watching him is a breath of fresh air.
On the other hand, as a fan who also enjoys watching his favorite team win baseball games, it’s been a maddening season for the Cubs’ third baseman. He’s been given a full-time defensive home at third base, and is one of the worst defensive players in baseball. His bat, despite showing some potential for major productivity, has regressed to the point where he is below-average overall. Combine all of that, and he’s been worth just 0.1 WAR, according to FanGraphs. Needless to say, this is not the season any of us had in mind after such a positive showing in his first two seasons in the bigs.
Many would point to Morel’s expected stats and declare that he is actually having the best offensive season of his young career. By one metric, one would be correct! According to Baseball Savant, his .354 xwOBA is the highest of his career, up from .340 last season, and .321 the year before. That’s because xwOBA is a stat that attempts to determine how a hitter should be performing based on exit velocity, launch angle, and in certain instances, sprint speed. Like wOBA (which measures actual performance), an xwOBA of about .320 is considered average. So a .354 xwOBA is quite high, and would put him in the 83rd percentile of hitters.
With a wOBA of .303 this season, Morel’s xwOBA marks him as one of the unluckiest hitters in baseball. The -.051 gap between his wOBA and his xwOBA is the third-lowest in all of baseball, per Baseball Savant. So give it some time, and Morel should start putting up better numbers. Right?
One potential gap in Baseball Savant’s version of xwOBA is that it doesn’t take spray angle into account. In other words, whether or not the ball was pulled, hit to center field, or hit to the opposite field doesn’t factor in. This has been covered pretty extensively in previous writing of mine, but for the uninitiated, not all batted balls are created equal, even after accounting for exit velocity and launch angle. A 370-foot fly ball hit down the line to left field is a home run almost every time. A 370-foot fly ball hit to center field is a routine flyout almost every time.
Fortunately for us, Pitcher List does take this into account. Morel’s xwOBA over there is .329, which would still suggest he’s an average-plus hitter and that he has been unlucky when compared to his wOBA. However, it’s a far cry from suggesting he is one of the 40 or so best hitters in baseball, as Baseball Savant’s figure does. This also puts him right on par with last season, when Pitcher List had him with a .328 xwOBA.
Morel certainly has made some positive adjustments this season. He is swinging at fewer pitches outside of the zone and striking out a career-low 23.5 percent of the time. Logically, if we go off of Pitcher List’s xwOBA, it’s essentially being canceled out by the fact that he is now hitting 34.5 percent of his balls in play to center field, which is up from 28.3 percent last season. To make it even worse, that’s at the expense of balls being hit to the pull side, which is at 48.4 percent this year, down from 55 percent last year.
With all of that out there, it makes me wonder if Morel’s positive adjustments this year really are positive, at all. Sure, he is chasing less outside the zone. He’s also swinging at fewer offerings in the zone, and making contact with more of the pitches outside the zone that he does swing at. I’m wondering if this is what is causing him to pull the ball less, and it also could be the culprit behind his decline in average exit velocity and barrel rate from last year to this year. He just isn’t hitting the ball with the same authority that he did last season.
After such a disappointing first half, the second half of this season is do-or-die time for Morel, as a Cub. He was given the third base job this year both out of necessity and out of respect for his potential. It’s not even a decision that I disagreed with. But to this point, it hasn’t worked out. He has responded by being one of the worst defenders in all of baseball, and regressing with the bat as well. According to FanGraphs, the Cubs have gotten -0.1 WAR out of their third basemen this season, which is only better than the lowly Miami Marlins and Chicago White Sox. As that implies, having a black hole like that in the lineup is often disqualifying for playoff hopefuls.
Leave a Reply